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Violence Prevention in Schools - Enhancement Through Law Enforcement Partnerships (1)

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2. Pre-work - NASRO's School Resource Officer Program Recommendations

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Our explainer outlines the definition of school resource officers, how they differ from other police and school safety personnel in schools, research on their effectiveness, and some of the difficult tradeoffs district officials and others must contend with as they examine their school policing programs.

What is a school resource officer? Are SROs armed?

A school resource officer is a sworn law-enforcement officer with arrest powers who works, either full or part time, in a school setting. Nearly all SROs are armed (about 91 percent, according to federal data), and most carry other restraints like handcuffs as well.

What does school resource officer training look like?

The main difference separating an SRO from other police officers is that, in theory, they have had some special training on how to work with youths. A membership group for SROs, the National Association of School Resource Officers, offers several such courses. NASRO's basic 40-hour training includes some content on the adolescent brain, cyber safety, and violence prevention in schools, among other topics.

In practice, it's not clear how many school police actually have had this training or similar types. States set different requirements for what training SROs need to have before working in schools, and some SROs report feeling unprepared for the job. In a 2018 Education Week Research Surveyof SROs, about 1 in 5 respondents said they didn't have sufficient training to work in a school environment, only 39 percent said they had training on child trauma, and about half said they hadn't been trained to work with special education students.

What do school resource officers do?

As for daily duties, NASRO indicates that officers play a tripartite role of law enforcement, informal mentoring and counseling, and some in-person teaching. In this sense, the theory of school-based policing is aligned with that of community policing: using local partnerships with other public entities to bring more resources to bear on safety.

Similar to the debate about whether community policing truly improves trust in law enforcement and safety-or merely increases surveillance-critics question whether it's possible for the same officers to play all those roles at once.

School resource officer statistics: How many SROs are there?

SROs are not required to register in any kind of national database, so there are only estimates of their numbers-no firm tally.

Another way to examine this picture is to look at the proportion of schools that employ an SRO.

The most recent federal data available, from the 2017-18 school year, show that about 45 percent of schools had an SRO in place at least once a week. (Another 13 percent of schools reported hosting police who were not SROs.)

This represents a steady growth over the last few decades; only 32 percent of schools reported having an SRO in 2005-06.

Why has the number of school resource officers grown?

Although school policing has been around since at least the late 1950s, it expanded notably in the 1990s due to three major factors: concerns about rising rates of juvenile crime in the 1990s, the federal government's funding of community policing programs beginning with the 1994 crime bill and its establishment of the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) hiring program, and the 1999 Columbine shooting in Littleton, Colo.

Traditionally, SROs have been more common in secondary schools than in elementary schools, but there are indications that the proportion working in elementary schools has risen. This appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon caused by several high-profile school shootings in the late 2010s, as states began to pass laws requiring SROs or other armed personnel in schools.

Besides school resource officers, are there other police officers or armed individuals who work in and around schools?

Yes. These can be campus security officers, regular beat cops who are assigned to school areas, and even laypeople.

A 2018 Maryland law, for example, requires schools to have SROs or "adequate police coverage," which can include sheriff's deputies, patrol officers, or others who can access school grounds in response to calls or to conduct other business.

And a Florida law passed the same year required all schools to hire either an SRO or to have an armed guardian, a layperson who carries a firearm and participates in a state training program.

Do districts get to select school resource officers?

This depends on the arrangement that school districts have with law-enforcement agencies. Some have little say in selecting the officers, while in other districts, central office administrators or even principals can interview the officers and select or reject candidates.

A handful of large districts, including Miami-Dade, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Houston, among others, have their own in-house police forces, presumably because they can more directly control hiring and train them for the nuances of their own schools, though there is little to suggest that an in-house police force yields different outcomes for safety. Other districts, including Shelby County, Tenn., are expressing new interest in these arrangements.

What is an MOU? What do they govern?

A memorandum of understanding or MOU is an interagency agreement that theoretically documents how SROs are selected and trained, prescribes their duties and limitations, details how the agreement can be renewed or modified, and specifies how costs are apportioned among the agencies.

Some districts, including Chicago and New York City, have recently modified these documents to clarify that SROs should not be involved in routine discipline matters (like a student interrupting or refusing to follow directions in class). New York's also calls on them to use diversionary tactics for low-level crimes and only to arrest in the case of violent crimes or felonies.

It's not clear how such changes might affect outcomes for students, because researchers haven't yet attempted to analyze a large sample of MOUs or to correlate specific features of MOUs to things like student safety, behavioral incidents in schools, juvenile-justice referrals, or other outcomes.

What do we know about school resource officers and their effectiveness on schools from research?

Studying SROs is a difficult task. They usually aren't managed by schools, but by police departments, which makes it difficult to track which schools have officers. Until this decade, cause-and-effect research on SROs was virtually nonexistent, despite the millions of dollars spent hiring, training, and placing them in schools.

Now that's starting to change. Newer studies have used complex statistical methods to link the presence of SROs to both student behavior patterns and their consequences. The emerging picture suggests that while school police do mitigate some types of violence in schools, their presence also increases certain kinds of disciplinary outcomes, including suspensions and expulsions, as well as arrests. (See the next header for details.)

Despite these advances, many holes remain in the research. For one thing, even the best empirical studies don't offer a lot of insight into what happens in the black box of school culture. Principals, for example, are the ones who ultimately make decisions about school discipline and suspensions, suggesting some of these patterns are not merely due to police officers' presence but because educators are asking them to intervene. The findings point, in other words, to a larger problem of the cultural context of schools. (In its own survey of SROs, for example, NASRO officers reported that more than a third of arrests they made were referred to them by school staff.)

We also know less about how other differences in SRO characteristics shape school policing. For example, how does an SRO's age, experience, type or intensity of training, or other factor influence how they work with principals, teachers, and educators?

Case studies, observations and interviews of SROs paint a more qualitative picture of SROs' beliefs and attitudes about their roles. These tend to be based on non-nationally representative samples, though, which could introduce bias into the results.

Some advocates, including Black Lives Matter activists, argue that school resource officers contribute to a 'school to prison pipeline.' Why?

Education Week found, for instance, that in 43 states and the District of Columbia, Black students were arrested at school at disproportionately high levels-sometimes at shockingly high rates. In 10 states, it found that the share of arrested Black students was 20 percentage points higher than these students' share of enrollment. (These figures were most disproportionate for Black students, but, to a lesser extent, also show up for other students of color.)

While suggestive, these data weren't conclusive evidence that police in schools were directly responsible for these patterns; perhaps SROs were simply more likely to work in schools with more problems.

But now a growing body of new empirical research shows a consistent link between the presence of police officers in schools and these discipline patterns. Most of this research is based on analyses of districts that have participated in the COPS grant program. Researchers have found ways to compare discipline outcomes between schools in districts that received the grants to those that didn't, while controlling for demographics. Some of these analyses focus on student-level outcomes.

In one study released just this year, for example, researchers found that the presence of SROs in schools that received those grants saw a higher proportion number of suspensions, expulsions, police referrals, and arrests of students compared to those that missed out on the grants; the effects were two times larger for Black than for white students. This study inches closer to a cause-and-effect model than most prior research.

It's consistent with some other recent studies, one of which found that adding police led to more arrests among children under age 15 as a result of the grants. A study in Texas, found that middle school disciplinary rates rose by 6 percent after schools received the grants and that the increases were concentrated among Black and Hispanic students.

Do school resource officers help make schools safer?

In a sense, the answer to this question truly depends on how communities defines a "safe school." Is a safe school one that has few or no violent incidents? One replete with bulletproof glass and metal detectors? One that values strong, warm relationships among faculty and students? Opinions differ, school communities prioritize different ideas about safety, and not all of the different notions are easily compatible.

That said, by at least one definition, they do appear to make a difference in one dimension of safety. A series of recent studies conclude that the presence of SROs does appear to lead to declines in violent incidents in schools, such as rape, robbery, and physical attacks.

On the other hand, it is far from clear that SROs do much to prevent school shootings-the very phenomenon that prompted a large increase in their numbers in the past decade.

In fact, one recent study found some preliminary though not conclusive evidence that the presence of SROs increased, rather than decreased, the odds of firearm-related incidents on campuses. This could be because having SROs, by definition, increases the number of guns at school. (The researchers urge caution about the finding because the number of school shootings in the sample was so small.)

These safety improvements seem to come at a significant cost for some students, as discussed in the previous section.

Have any districts taken steps to remove school resource officers?

Yes. EdWeek published a database of districts that have either cut funding to their school police programs or removed SROs from buildings.

How are we supposed to interpret these findings overall?

That's the huge challenge facing school district leaders, school boards, and principals.

One way is to consider whether the safety benefits of SROs still justify the cost, given the documented harms of exclusionary discipline, suspensions, and juvenile justice referrals. In general, violence and crime rates in schools have declined over the past 20 years, raising questions about salience: Is it still necessary to have so many police officers in schools?

High profile school shootings, including Sandy Hook, Conn., in 2014 and Parkland, Fla. in 2018 have complicated the discussion-though there's little to suggest that the presence or absence of school police might have prevented these.

Thus the larger question seems to be sociological. Uniformed officers and panda cars, along with metal detectors and bulletproof glass, are powerful signifiers for parents and community members that something's being done to address safety regardless of whether they actually make students safer.

And there remains much uncertainty-as well as considerable doubt from advocates-about whether tweaks, including better-written MOUs and more district control over SRO programs can fundamentally reshape the school policing conversation.

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School Resource Officers (SROs), Explained

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Does the presence of armed officers prevent school violence? Do they contribute for Black children to the 'school to prison pipeline'?

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Adolescent Mental Health Training for SRO's and Educators

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Adolescent Mental Health Training for SRO's and Educators

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Reports of Threats, Guns brought to school

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Reports of Threats, Guns brought to school

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PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) -- Multiple schools across Arizona have received threats of potential school shootings and students bringing guns to school in a week. Seven schools have received threats or brought guns to school this week alone, prompting lockdowns and even classes canceled in some cases. In addition, several students have been detained and could be facing serious charges.

PHOENIX

On Thursday, Central High School was placed on lockdown as Phoenix police investigated a possible threat toward the school. Police detained one person, and the high school lifted the lockdown. Parents were allowed to pick up their students at school. No staff or students were hurt.

WEST VALLEY

Officers were at Sierra Linda High School in Tolleson investigating a threat toward the school on Thursday afternoon. The school wasn't placed on lockdown, and school officials say the day continued as normal with no issues. It's unknown if the threat was legitimate.

EAST VALLEY

On Wednesday, police received a report of a threat at Archway Veritas Great Heart Academy in Scottsdale. Police say two students posted threats on social media and another student found a threatening note at school. Police say at the time that "there was nothing to indicate the threats were credible."

However, on Thursday, staff identified the two students who were behind the threats. Officers found the two students before the school day started and detained them. The school decided to cancel classes for the rest of the day. The school released a statement regarding the threat.
"Early this morning we were made aware of a threat to the Great Hearts Veritas campus. Details came in before school had started. Out of an abundance of caution, we closed school today while police conducted a full investigation. The police identified and detained two suspects this morning. Classes will resume tomorrow (Friday).The safety of our students, faculty and staff is our top priority and all threats are taken seriously. Any further questions can be addressed to local law enforcement."
On Monday, Gilbert police discovered a student brought a BB gun to Mesquite Junior High. Staff acted immediately and no one was hurt. Gilbert police found the student responsible and said they submitted charges of disorderly conduct against the student. A letter was sent home to parents after the incident.
Dear Mesquite Junior High Families, It is important to us to keep our parents and families as informed as possible regarding any incidents involving our campus and students. Today, reports were received of a student on campus who had brought a BB-gun to school. The Mesquite Junior High Administration acted immediately and at no time were students or employees in any danger. Gilbert Police Department was informed immediately and the investigation is ongoing. Providing a safe and secure learning environment is a top priority for Gilbert Public Schools,and Mesquite Junior High School. Please be assured we take incidents like this very seriously. Thank you for your continued support of our students and our school.
OUTSIDE MARICOPA COUNTY

On Wednesday, school resource officers received a tip of a possible shooting at Kingman High School. The SROs called Mohave County Sheriff's Office to begin investigating the threats. Deputies began speaking to students, but no evidence was found for the claims. Deputies and detectives were back on campus on Thursday for extra safety and to interview more students. Deputies say if any legitimate threats are found, charges will be filed.

Meanwhile, in San Tan Valley, Pinal County Sheriff's Office deputies were called out to Circle Cross Ranch STEM Academy on Thursday after an eighth grade student reportedly brought a gun to school. Staff found out about the handgun after students had been dismissed for the day. Deputies found out who the student was and searched them, and didn't find any weapons. However, the student admitted to deputies they had brought a gun to school the day prior. Deputies stayed on campus throughout the school day on Thursday. School officials sent out a letter to parents regarding the incident.
In our effort to keep parents fully informed, I am writing this letter to notify you of an incident that was reported to school administration yesterday afternoon by a parent. It was brought to our attention that a 9mm gun was brought on campus by a student yesterday. We immediately contacted the Pinal County Sheriff's Office and conducted a thorough threat assessment. The school administration moved quickly to ensure the safety of all children and staff while they worked to establish the validity of the report.
On Monday, Cochise County Sheriff's deputies were called out to a Cochise County school after reports of a second-grade student bringing a gun to school. Deputies searched the student's backpack, found two guns and ammunition, and called the student's parents. In addition, deputies filled out a juvenile referral for charges of misconduct with a weapon and minor in possession of a firearm.

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Reports of threats, students bringing guns to multiple schools across Arizona

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PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) -- Multiple schools across Arizona have received threats of potential school shootings and students bringing guns to school in a week. Seven schools have received threats or brought guns to school this week alone, prompting lockdowns and even classes canceled in some cases.